by Karin Nordin
Inside the box was a stack of old Polaroids tied together by a brittle rubber band that had long since lost its stretch and had begun to fray and peel where it met the corners of the photographs. When Kjeld picked up the stack of photos the rubber band fell away in pieces at the bottom of the tackle box.
He spread the photographs across the duvet.
Kjeld had never seen these images before. There were a few of the family, mostly during what appeared to be an outdoor picnic. Midsommar, perhaps. One that caught his attention showed his parents, sister, and him as an infant, held by his mother, standing in front of the house. It stood out because Kjeld had never seen a picture of himself at that age. He was so small in the photo that it couldn’t have been too long after he was born. In fact, it might have been the only photo of him before age two that Kjeld had ever seen.
He continued rifling through the pictures. One of Sara – “age three” was written on the back – in a sandbox. Another depicted his father and grandfather standing side by side in front of the barn. A photo of the rookery before his father built the more elaborate nesting nooks and perches that were still out there now.
The rest of the photos were older and completely unfamiliar to Kjeld. They showed what appeared to be a dinner party at a house that Kjeld didn’t recognise. A house that was too nice to be in Varsund. Kjeld’s mother featured in most of the pictures. She looked young and vibrant and at an age that must have been around the time his parents got married. His father still had their wedding photo on his nightstand and the way Kjeld’s mother’s face looked in that photo matched those in the tackle box. It was strange. Like looking at someone through a mirror.
Kjeld paused longer on one of the photographs, yellowed with age. In the picture his mother was sitting at a baby grand piano in a long evening gown. Her hair was done up in a twist and she was looking back over her shoulder at the photographer with a vibrant and playful smile. A wave of nostalgia, warm but conflicted, passed over him as Kjeld recalled a memory from his childhood.
Kjeld sat at the upright Bechstein piano nestled in the narrow corridor between the foyer and the living room, legs dangling. He was tall enough to reach the pedals if he sat on the edge of the bench, but he didn’t know how to use them, so he sat further away until the backs of his knees hit the corner of the seat. If he sat in that position long enough, toes brushing at the floor during their idle swings, his legs would start to tingle and go numb. Then he’d scoot forward again until they regained sensation.
His mother was a talented pianist and she’d started teaching Kjeld to play since before he could remember. She tried with Sara, as well, but Sara hadn’t taken much interest in it. Truth be told, Kjeld wasn’t interested in music either – he’d rather be out in the woods looking for limestone fragments or huggorm snakes – but he enjoyed the time spent with his mother. And because he enjoyed her company and revelled in the pleasure she took when he accomplished something new, he tried his best to learn how to play.
Today, however, he sat alone and that ebbed his desire to practice.
The yelling didn’t help either.
‘I won’t have that man in my house!’ Stenar’s voice bellowed from the kitchen.
In contrast Eiji’s voice was calm and composed. ‘Isn’t it time you two let bygones be bygones? You’re best friends.’
‘That man is not my friend. He insults me. How dare he after all these years. After what he’s done. And not only that, he insults my work. It’s no big secret that Norrmalm Industries has been deliberately subverting the national environmental guidelines in order to maximise their production output. They’re destroying the Varsund forest.’
Kjeld didn’t hear his name in the argument, but for some reason he still felt like it was his fault that his father was upset. He brought a hand to his left ear where it was wrapped in sticking plaster and white bandage after the incident in the barn the day before. The day that stranger came to visit. Kjeld was still shaky from the experience, but mostly he was ashamed. He felt stupid for being so afraid.
Kjeld stared down at the ivory-coloured keys, running the pads of his fingers over them without making a sound. He didn’t want to hear his parents fighting, but he didn’t want to anger his father by making too much noise. Perhaps if he played something quiet, it would blanket the sounds of their argument. Perhaps if he played well it would even cause them to stop.
He spread the sheet music for his mother’s current practice song, Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1, across the music rack. The song was far too advanced for him to play both the upper and lower staffs, so he started with the right hand until he had the tune and slowly added in the dominant chord with the left hand. He was always a little off with the timing, the left hand beginning a split second behind the right, resulting in a jilting discordance.
But the arguing continued.
‘It’s been years, Stenar. You know how difficult things were back then. He lost his wife, for God’s sake. And things weren’t easy for us either. You have to let it go. If not for you then for our family. I won’t stand for this kind of animosity in the house. Not around the children.’
‘He didn’t give me a choice.’
‘But I am.’
Kjeld pressed down harder on the chords, focusing on the sound to drown out the voices. The song was marked lento, but he found himself quickening his pace as he reached the twenty-fifth measure and practically pounding the keys when he turned the page to the forty-ninth. He continually missed the A-flat and by the time he reached the final section, which should have increased in intensity, he was so lost in being loud that there was nothing left that even remotely resembled a tune.
A gentle hand was placed on his shoulder, quietly urging him to stop. He did. Then he scooted over to allow his mother room to sit beside him.
Eiji picked up the music and neatly set them aside. Then she placed an intermediate learner’s book on the rack.
Kjeld breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Let’s try something a little more fun,’ she said. The rims of her eyes were red and Kjeld knew she’d been crying. But there were no tears on her face and her mouth was drawn in a smile. ‘You play the bass clef and I’ll play the treble.’
Kjeld clenched his eyes shut, forcing the memory away. When he opened them again he set the photo down and picked up another. It was the smile. The smile was wrong in every image.
Kjeld always remembered his mother as being quiet and tired, her smile sad. The woman in these photos was a far cry from that lonely woman in his memory. This woman was bold. Her hair loose, lips red. She looked like a Stockholm socialite, not the wife of a reclusive backwoods forester. This woman looked like his mother, but Kjeld didn’t recognise her. Nor did he recognise the other people in the photos, mostly men in suits with glasses of champagne in their hands.
Kjeld flipped over the back of one of the photos and read the inscription. N.M. Christmas Party 1978. A year before he was born. Sara would have been a year old then, but his mother didn’t look like a woman with a one-year-old child. Or, at least, didn’t look the way she had when Kjeld was that young. He placed the dinner party photo side by side with the photo of his mother holding him as an infant. She had so much life in the first photo. How could little more than a year change so much in a person?
Kjeld sighed and was about to drop the rest of the photos back into the tackle box when he came across an even older photo. This one was of his father during his required military service. Nineteen and awkward. He stood beside another man in their uniforms, arms around each other, posing with wide smiles and their standard-issue rifles. Kjeld homed his attention in on the other man. An older version of him was also present in one of the photos of the Christmas party with his mother, but there was something else about his face that was familiar. Kjeld had the feeling he’d seen it somewhere before, somewhere recent, but he couldn’t quite place where. He turned the photo and looked at the back. There was nothing written on it. Kjeld looked a
t the man with the familiar face. Maybe he just resembled someone he once met. Then he directed his attention to his father. Young, smiling, happy. Like the photo of his mother, an image that didn’t match with his memory.
How could he not know these people?
* * *
Ahlgren Plumbing Services. Dahl Roofing. Forsberg Cabin Rentals.
The rolodex was like a trip back in time. Kjeld’s father, it seemed, had deemed it important to categorise every workman, every motel, and every healthcare professional that the family had ever used. Even Kjeld’s childhood dentist, Dr Horn, a German transplant with snaggleteeth and a glass eye who was dead going on twenty years now, was still listed in the collection of phone numbers, albeit the card had taken on a faded yellow hue.
Kjeld flipped through the rolodex, trying not to let his mind wander to the tackle box of unfamiliar photographs. Trying not to wonder why his father would hide them, locked away and forgotten in the musty bowels of the cellar. Or had it been his mother’s secret collection? Was she the one who’d concealed those images from view? Images that had since been overlooked or displaced in the years following her death.
She looked so happy and radiant in the party photos. And so despondent holding that infant in her arms. Holding him. As though something in that year had broken her spirit and sucked any joy right out of her.
It was painful for Kjeld to think that it might have been him who’d torn that optimism from her life. That his birth had shattered any future happiness she might have had. But when he saw the photographs and looked at the dates, it wasn’t a far stretch of the imagination.
His fingers stopped on a card near the back of the rolodex.
The business card was slightly faded and torn in the upper right-hand corner. It was heavier than normal, printed on a high-quality cardstock. The design was simple, elegant, like one would expect to see for an elite firm for large corporations. Not the kind of attorney for a man who scraped by just enough money a year to live comfortably in the middle of nowhere. Not the kind of attorney the average run-of-the-mill working-class wage earner could afford.
Erik Norberg, Advokat: Contract & Family Law.
Why would his father need a contract lawyer?
Kjeld took out his mobile phone and began dialling the number on the card.
‘Let’s see if Mr Norberg is still practising,’ he said aloud to himself.
Chapter 14
Söndag | Sunday
The next morning Stenar acted as though the discovery of a body in the barn had never occurred. He woke up, showered, dressed himself – although his shirt was on backwards – and made his own breakfast without any difficulty. Kjeld was almost envious of his ability to forget. There were so many moments in his life he wished he could hide in the back of a drawer and never think about again.
While they ate breakfast, Kjeld tried to bring up the photographs that he’d found the night before, but his father either didn’t understand him or was ignoring his questions. Kjeld considered pushing further, but decided it was too early in the day to start arguing. Perhaps he would try again later, if his father was in a stable mood. When they finished and Kjeld had put away the dishes, he told his father that he was going to hike up into the woods behind the barn and see if he could find any trace of the person he’d chased. He wasn’t prepared to leave the investigation in Gunnar’s hands. Even if Gunnar was capable of finding out the truth of what happened in the barn, Kjeld didn’t trust him to be forthright about it. And he didn’t want to take any chances.
‘I’m going with you,’ Stenar said as he grabbed his winter coat from the rack in the hall.
‘It could be a long hike.’
‘I’ve hiked Kungsleden from Abisko to Nikkaluokta and that’s mostly alpine.’
Kjeld thought about mentioning that it had probably been more than thirty years since his father made that trip, but decided that, like the photographs, it was an argument not worth getting into. Instead he snatched a spare coat from the closet, retrieved his father’s hiking stick from the corridor, and went out into the yard.
Much of the snow that had fallen the day before had already melted, but the air was still frigid, nipping at Kjeld’s face. He zipped the coat up through the collar to break against the cold. The slope that he’d scrambled up during the chase was too slippery for Stenar to walk on, so they took the long way around following an old trail that he and his father used to hike when he was a boy.
The ground crunched beneath Stenar’s boots and Kjeld slowed his pace to make sure his father didn’t slip on an unseen patch of ice. But unlike Kjeld, who still had some pain in his hip from the fall, Stenar seemed to have no difficulty navigating the terrain. Not that this should have surprised Kjeld. His father had probably hiked this path hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times over his lifetime. As had his grandfather and great-grandfather before him.
They reached a bend where the well-worn path disintegrated into a deep stretch of forest. Kjeld knew they would have to cut to the right and continue upwards in order to find the cavern he’d fallen into the day before, but Stenar persisted on continuing straight on.
‘The cavern is this way, Dad.’
‘That’s not where we’re going,’ Stenar said, using the hiking stick as leverage to step over a fallen log.
‘We came out here to follow the path of the person who was in your barn. They didn’t go this way. I chased them in the other direction.’ Kjeld stared off towards the right. He could see where the ground lifted up towards the ridge and the sudden openness peeked through the trees, letting in more light.
The path his father was on led deeper into the forest where, despite the early hour, it was still dark and murky.
But Stenar wasn’t letting up and Kjeld didn’t know how he’d manage to get his father back to the house if he had one of his Alzheimer’s-induced episodes in the middle of the woods. Instead of risking his father becoming violent as he did at the dinner table the day he arrived, Kjeld continued after him off the main path.
‘Where are we going?’ Kjeld asked.
‘It’s not far from here,’ Stenar replied, slowly weaving through the brush.
Further into the forest there was still a thin layer of snow on the ground, through which the mossy undergrowth occasionally seeped through. The spruce stretched above them like bristled statues. Their trunks were bare nearer to the ground, blocking out the sky with their slim branches of thick green nettles, creating a spiny canopy overhead. Kjeld felt like the trees were closing in on them and his heart pounded in his chest against this unexpected claustrophobia. He stepped on a twig and it snapped. The sound echoed in every direction. He cast his gaze behind them, feeling eyes on the back of his neck, and half expected to see someone following. There was no one there. He’d never feared the forest growing up, but something about it now unnerved him. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t alone.
‘I think we should go back.’ Allowing his father to go with him had been a foolish idea. Anything could have happened out there and they would be miles away from help.
‘Not much further now,’ Stenar said.
Where was his father taking them?
Kjeld’s thoughts returned to the barn and that gruesome discovery. He tried not to imagine the worst, but that’s what he’d been trained to do. And it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to consider the fact that his father may have been more involved than he’d let on. After all, what reason would anyone else have to bury a body on his property?
They crossed a small creek, after which the ground became marshier. Kjeld could feel his boots sinking into the wet earth, each step more difficult than the last. Just as he was about to insist that they turn back, the boggy ground opened up to a small clearing. Tucked into the corner of that clearing was a hunting cabin with a single window and a moss-covered roof.
Stenar sat down on a bench beside a fire pit to catch his breath. There was no smell of fire, but Kjeld noticed that the ash in the
pit was black as though it had been recently used. For all other intents and purposes, however, the place appeared to be abandoned.
‘Whose place is this?’ Kjeld asked, surprised to find a clearing this deep in the woods.
Stenar leaned his hiking stick against his leg. ‘Mm?’
‘Does somebody live here?’
‘Who?’
‘The cabin, Dad. Who does it belong to?’
Stenar craned his neck to look at the cabin. His face showed little recognition. His legs had brought them to this place out of some blip in his memory, but his mind couldn’t recall why.
Kjeld made his way closer to the cabin and peered in through the window. The thick layer of dust and grime on the glass made it impossible to see inside. When he went around to the door, however, he stopped, surprised to see his own name carved on a dark piece of wood above the threshold.
No, not his name.
‘Is this great-grandfather’s cabin?’ Kjeld asked.
Stenar didn’t reply. He just mumbled to himself, digging his hiking stick into the ash of the fire pit.
Kjeld opened the door and peered inside. It was a cramped single room with a bed built into the wall. There were sheets on the bed, indented from the weight of someone who’d been sleeping there, and blankets piled up at the foot of the mattress. On the floor were dozens of empty inferior-brand Finnish vodka bottles and crushed beer cans. The smell from inside was the ripe and pungent odour of sweat and alcohol that almost made Kjeld gag.
He shut the door and walked around to the back of the cabin where he was surprised to see a narrow dirt road leading through the trees and a car covered in a heavy rain-proof tarp. He lifted the front of the tarp, revealing a silver mid-size Mercedes-Benz CLK-class coupe which, aside from some weathering rust on its lower frame looked to be in perfect condition. Kjeld pulled off the rest of the tarp and peered inside. Clean leather interior. Empty. And no licence plates. A car he knew did not belong to anyone with the last name Nygaard. He snapped a photo with his phone and covered it back up.